The unregulated feline fashion model industry is booming, like a prospectin' town in the Ol' West or a shore town's lone custard stand over Fourth of July weekend. Cats owe their new popularity among fashion photographers largely to their conspicuous mix of fuzziness and haughtiness, and also to the fact that they dominate the internet and all magazines nowadays want to be just like the internet because the internet is where all the super-cool people hang out, like you and me (but not any of these other dweebs, *elbow in the ribs, snicker snicker*).

Amy Odell over at Buzzfeed chronicles the rise of fashion cats, which have been appearing more often in ads ever since Lanvin's fall 2009 campaign. Since that fateful season, cats have infiltrated Miuccia Prada, Chanel, Givenchy and even magazine editorials (as writers, I would assume, because cats seem like they'd make good writers). Even Karl Lagerfeld's cat Choupette — who has more employees than you have had or ever will have acquaintances — is starting to make her presence felt on the fashion scene, securing representation from IMG and a recent photo shoot with model Laetitia Casta.

The problem, though, with the cat trend is that cats, according to Karen Hoeverman, cat whisperer, are really hard to train, probably as hard as they are to herd or teach how to samba on only their hind legs (it can be done). Even with regular training sessions, some cats can still be intransigent assholes and straight-up refuse to cooperate with anyone else's schedule. They earn comparatively less than human models ($20,000 a year is a really high cat model salary), and, surprise, the fashion industry is extremely choosy about which cats are most photogenic. If you think "smashed-in face" cats would be the most popular at fashion shoots because they are the most popular at fashion shows, it just proves how little you know about fashion — smash-face cats look too angry to help sell designer clothes, so designers prefer to use long-nose cats, ocelot-looking cats.

If you have a cat and you're thinking, "Hey, my cat is adorable and well-behaved enough not to kick poop out of the litterbox — I should put it in Vogue or something, the better to supplement my own income," two things: congratulations on being a responsible pet owner, and nobody wants your ugly cat to be in their ad for handbags. Career cats dominate the fashion scene (they have their own agents and everything), and if those cats ever saw an normie cat try to worm its way onto a fashion shoot, they'd probably snark on its belly pouch, because cats can be really shallow and mean.